A video of Virginia Beach Police Department beating and tasing two teenagers during a traffic stop has gone viral, prompting an internal investigation into the incident, Addicting Info reported.
Courtney Griffith, 18, was pulled over by the VBPD in January of this year because one of her tail lights wasn’t working. The officer told Griffith and her 17-year-old passenger that he smelled marijuana in the car. Griffith denied the drug possession and began recording the encounter with her cell phone when things started getting hostile.
The passenger was pepper sprayed, beaten, and tased by the police before being pulled from the car. The video cuts off after an officer looks inside the car and notices the phone, turning off the camera.
When Griffith finally got her phone back, she noticed the video had been deleted. However, the phone had saved a copy in the “recently deleted items” folder.
“They arrested me, never Mirandized me [or the passenger], and they sent me off with a summons,” Griffith told the Free Thought Project. “When I went back to my car, my phone had been brought off the dashboard and was on the driver’s seat. I asked the cops who deleted the video, after looking for it in my folder, and they all started laughing. It was sickening.”
Griffith posted the video on Facebook, and it soon made the rounds on social media, but the VBPD claims it only recently learned of the footage.
Given that the police tried to delete the video, this is clearly a lie, which isn’t surprising given the officers’ behavior.
Watch the graphic footage from the traffic stop.
